![]() ![]() It was implicit in the close-up photograph of a splinter in his finger, portentously titled “Material Interchange.” It was explicit in “Charmed Journey Through a Step-Down Transformer,” a Rube Goldberg-like outdoor installation from 1980 that sprawled 125 feet down a slope at the Wave Hill garden and cultural center in the Bronx, its disparate parts suggesting engines, tracks, organ pipes and much else. Oppenheim had a penchant for grandiosity. For “Rocked Circle Fear,” a 1971 body art piece, he stood at the center of a five-foot-wide circle painted on a New York sidewalk while a friend dropped fist-size stones from three stories above, aiming for inside the circle without hitting the artist. But he was always a showman, not averse to the circuslike, or to courting danger. Oppenheim started out in the realm of the esoteric, the immaterial and the chronically unsalable. Oppenheim, who died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, had homes in Manhattan and the Springs section of East Hampton on Long Island.īelonging to a generation of artists who saw portable painting and sculpture as obsolete, Mr. The cause was liver cancer, his wife, Amy Van Winkle Plumb, said. Dennis Oppenheim, a pioneer of earthworks, body art and Conceptual art who later made emphatically tangible installations and public sculptures that veered between the demonically chaotic and the cheerfully Pop, died on Friday in Manhattan. ![]()
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